The threat of asteroid impacts on Earth necessitates the detection and tracking of potentially hazardous asteroids to develop effective mitigation strategies. This PhD project aims to explore the combined use of the Vera Rubin Observatory (Legacy Survey of Space and Time - LSST) and the Global Fireball Observatory for identifying asteroids impacting the Earth. The upcoming Australian Dynamic REd All-sky Monitoring Survey (DREAMS)'s high-cadence near-infrared observations will open a new parameter space on the asteroid population. With proprietary access to these three world class facilities, the candidate for this project will be in a unique position to push our knowledge of asteroids in our Solar System, and specifically the ones that can threaten the Earth. The main aim of this PhD project is to advance our understanding of the asteroid population and its potential impact on Earth by using LSST and fireball networks to detect and track potentially hazardous asteroids. The secondary aim to to make use of cutting-edge data from the Australian DREAMS telescope infrared survey, a so far poorly explored parameter space for asteroid characterisation. This PhD project has significant scientific and practical significance. Scientifically, it will advance our understanding of the asteroid population and its potential impact on Earth, and it will contribute to efforts to protect Earth from potential asteroid impacts. Practically, it will develop and test new algorithms and software tools for analysing LSST and DREAMS data, which can be used by astronomers and planetary defence experts to detect and track potentially hazardous asteroids, and to develop and implement mitigation strategies. Overall, this project will contribute to the ongoing efforts to study asteroids and their potential impact on Earth, and to protect our planet from potential catastrophic events.

The chance that one of the many Earth observation satellites capture the very instant of an asteroid impact on Earth are slim. But asteroid impacts leave dust trails that can be visible for hours. The project is about analysing evidence of superbolide dust trails left in the atmosphere by asteroid impacts, covering both visible (RGB) down to infrared wavelengths. Picture: dust trail from a superbolide over the Bering straight in 2018, imaged by the Himawari-8 weather satellite.

The Desert Fireball Network has been observing large shooting stars (fireball) at night time for nearly 10 years, detecting fireball using traditional image processing methods as well as image classification algorithms. With ~10,000 fireball images reviewed by humans and processed, a considerable training dataset has been built. This project will use modern object detection tools (YOLO type) to build a new transient detection model, and apply it to the 50 million images present in the DFN archive.

The alignment of three astronomical bodies (e.g. an eclipse) is often an occasion to learn something new. When an asteroid is perfectly aligned with a star, the star disappears for a brief moment. This event can be recorded with an optical telescope well situated in the shadow path, and is a unique opportunity to learn about the size and shape of the asteroid. At radio wavelengths, asteroids can occult background radio sources (galaxies etc.), however the measurements are affected by Fresnel diffraction (illustrating figure from Lehtinen+ 2016). The lower the frequency, the stronger this effect becomes. This project aims to study the theoritical framework of low-frequency occultation events, identifying the feasability and expected results from undertaking and reducing such observations using the SKA-low and the MWA telescopes.

The Desert Fireball Network has been observing large shooting stars (fireball) at night time for nearly 10 years. 4 years ago it started also recording video data during the day. It is expected that once in a while a fireball will be visible during the day, however one issue is the number of false positives present amongst the detections. The student will look at fireball camera video clips (this is data nobody has looked at before), develop methods to classify the transients that have been recorded, and possibly identify some of these rare daytime fireballs!